Rudi Dutschke

Although the phrase is often misattributed to Antonio Gramsci, it was the Marxist creep Rudi Dutschke who famously suggested the political left could ultimately control society via a “long march through the institutions.” And my, how they have marched, wriggling and crawling like screwworms to infest every aspect of national life and the body politic. The damage they have caused is immense.

You will find them everywhere—in public broadcasting, the education sector, the National Health Service, the welfare system, and the judiciary—fat, complacent, unaccountable, state-subsidized, and squandering our resources. Worst of all, they peddle a creed of dependency and victimhood and mediocrity and underachievement which produces nothing but failure, decline, and excuse. Just the result they wanted.

Look around. Everywhere is the toxic residue of the liberal-left agenda. Entitlement has replaced a sense of duty and hard work; human rights stand in for decency and common sense. Notions of inclusivity have pushed aside excellence; nebulous multiculturalism supplants patriotism, core common values, and national identity; moral relativism inhabits a space once occupied by basic ethics and a sense of right and wrong. Equality legislation has stifled enterprise and killed the free market. Overly enforced health and safety has chased away free will and quashed personal responsibility. All is geared to interference and intrusion, to the state ownership of society. Dutschke and his kind have wrecked us.

Be hopeless, and you will be raised up. Be a thief or a crackhead or a street thug, and the caring liberal-left will feel your pain. Be ineffectual and illiterate, and you will be given a plum job in the public sector. Be promiscuous and irresponsible, and the taxpayer will cough up for your revolting spawn. Be work-shy and idle, and you will be rebranded as special needs and given anything you want. Because the left wants to own you. It sure as hell needs your vote.

It was easy for the London rioters to smash things down, for they have never been forced to build anything up (whether a business, a career, savings, or even a stack of pancakes). Similarly, the state sector—dominated by a heavily unionized liberal-left—has been massively profligate because they are not the wealth-creators, nor are they spending their own money.

A barrister friend of mine recently overheard a looter convicted for his part in the London riots complain at being sentenced to custody in the Feltham Young Offenders Institution because “you have to queue for the snooker-table there.” Spot the glaring lack of deterrence or punishment. Then there is the property developer friend of mine who says that in order to be eligible for the government-backed Considerate Constructor Scheme, he is obliged—even when the building pile is over fifty stories high—to install disability-friendly toilets at the top of the scaffolding (presumably on the off chance a wheelchair-bound laborer wants to haul himself up several hundred feet to take a crap). A third friend of mine, a teacher, was castigated for correcting a student’s spelling on the grounds that it was oppressive and judgmental. Finally, a fourth friend—who employs a black African domestic in London—recounts how the woman has been given a free laptop computer to aid her bid to become a British citizen (in spite of her mistaking the Queen for my friend’s grandmother and believing someone named “Margaret” was our current prime minister).

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You might say they are all unrelated stories. Not a bit of it. They are products of the same narrative and corrosive lunacy virus. Go anywhere—peer inside any institution—and you will discover the soft left has visited before you, has ensured where once there were standards, discipline, and rigor there is now only a fetid heap of inertia, vested interest, right-on jargon, and corporatist bullshit.

Do not be mistaken and think the police are there to fight crime. The average Metropolitan police officer in London spends only 14% of his time actually walking the beat; a mere 11% of British police officers are available at any moment to respond to an emergency. The rest of their time appears to be spent filling out forms, sitting on their backsides drinking coffee, claiming overtime, taking remedial reading classes, and attending diversity seminars. Small wonder they encountered difficulties in controlling the streets during the riots.

Or try the education sector, where decades of liberal-left attitudes have rendered pupils unable to read or write and stripped the academic system of any meaning. The brightest sink to the bottom without a trace while the feral and the stupid are taught to finger-paint and procreate. Many state schools have become little more than holding pens for delinquents until semester ends and they can go out to make a living wage through knife crime and dealing crack. We call it the three Rs over here—rape, racketeering, and robbery. Teachers—like the police—have mutated into a branch of the social services, attempting to contain or clear up the human droppings excreted by the welfare system. It is hard to teach when your classroom is a war zone and you are trying to avoid being stabbed by a minor (or its parent). A school inspector recently told me how he had entered a classroom and found a girl straddling a boy’s lap. The two engaged in heavy petting while their teacher sat mute and intimidated in the corner. Maybe the only surprise is the adult wasn’t masturbating. The joys of progressive education.

And while we pump hundreds of thousands of undisciplined and unemployable young out onto the streets, their parents are being cosseted and kept alive by the crumbling National Health Service. A hundred billion pounds a year is spent, the institution is the world’s seventh largest employer, and still you are as likely to die from a secondary infection as you were in those Victorian-era medical hellholes. Squalor, waste, mismanagement, and propping up those who will not take responsibility for themselves—it could almost be a metaphor for socialism.

Come to Britain, be useless, and fail to master the English tongue. If you could be bothered, find yourself a forgettable job in some far-flung state outpost (maybe in equality or diversity or parking or counting paper clips). You can then be assured that me and other taxpayers will be obliged to support your fat and lazy ass and pay your full government pension when you decide on early retirement. Small wonder my entire philosophy is now summarized in a simple rhyme:

Fuck ’em all/
both short and tall.
There was an old lady who lived in a shoe/
and she can go fuck herself, too.

Given that we have been bankrupted by liberal-left profligacy and gimme rights, by welfare statism and big government, by corrupt and inane projects such as the European Union and its devil child the euro, perhaps the left-wing experiment will eventually flounder and die like Rudi Dutschke. He drowned in his bath from a seizure caused by the bullet lodged in his head (courtesy of a previous assassination attempt). Then again, one can rarely keep a shit idea from resurfacing.

“I’m not a racist, but…”

It is how most conversations with a Londoner start when discussing the prevailing ethnic—and specifically black—issue. Make no mistake, an issue it is, as the recent rioting across Britain proves. Look at the areas affected. Look at the instigators. Look at the feral aggression. Look at the jewelry, the designer goods, the cell-phone and sneaker stores looted. Look at the faces of those arrested. I think the demographic—in spite of reflexive attempts by broadcasters and the liberal left to play it down—is pretty clear. The majority of thugs out on the street are black. Quelle surprise. Oh yes, there will be the platitudes and excuses, the talk of poverty and deprivation and disenchantment and social exclusion. As one rioter put it: “We is protestin’ by thievin’.” And it is all utter bullshit. Yet you will never find a politician or self-appointed community leader with the balls and bottle to say it as it is, to break the taboo, to speak it out aloud. So let me spell it out for everyone—THE BLACKS HAVE A PROBLEM.

Only they would tell you that raw criminality is somehow a political act of defiance. Only they could shift the cause for their pillaging and arson to the system that apparently invites it—after all, a department store can seem so bright and shiny and provoking. Sure, many Afro-Caribbean citizens are law-abiding, but many also—including a vast percentage of young black males—are not. Check the statistics. Indeed, blacks carry out the majority of London street crime and two-thirds of firearms offenses. And the excuses come thick and fast.

Few play the blame game or point-the-finger exercise quite so avidly as the black community. Few have evolved such an advanced culture of victimhood from which their overdeveloped sense of grievance and entitlement has grown. They have the same education and opportunity as anyone else, but—oh no—they are special, are downtrodden, are misunderstood. We must atone and respect (or “respek”) them because they exist. Because of their gangsta rap. Because their young men wear hoods or carry knives or manage to walk in a menacing pimp roll. Funny, I always thought respect had to be earned. How white, outmoded, and middle-class of me.

Pervading all is the attitude that it is not their fault and never ever their responsibility. Should a young black be excluded from school, it is not because he is lazy, disruptive, or stupid, but because the education system is against him. Should the police stop him, it is not because he acts suspiciously or his kind commits most robberies, but because the police are inherently racist. Should he fail to gain a job, it is absolutely the employer’s fault and not because the applicant was sullen, lippy, and barely house-trained. So it goes on. And on and on. Complaint rather than effort and attainment has become the cultural norm. The liberal apologists are ever there to explain away and facilitate the mindset. Just like Muslims who will not accept jihadi extremists draw on the Islamic faith or environmentalists who cannot admit population growth is a key root of global warming, so few in the black community—even when the evidence is plain, even when the police run Operation Trident directly to tackle black gun crime—will put up their hands and say with honesty: “We have a problem and it is our own fault and our responsibility.”

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To utter such words would be construed as heresy, would be to stray from the adopted liberal-left consensus that every ill, every crime, every mishap within the black community is due to slavery and oppression by the whites. No matter slavery in Britain was abolished in 1833—we must still suffer the rage and allow plasma-screen televisions and top-of-the-range footwear to be looted from a burning store.

Welfare has institutionalized the belief in something-for-nothing, the attitude that the state will provide and pick up the pieces, the bill, and the broken glass and replace work and absent fathers with ready cash and immediate housing. No point in parenting when someone else will do it for you. It is fine to smash a shop front when insurance or the taxpayer will help the owners restock. It is fine to ruin a livelihood when you have no concept of earning. It is fine to take something that is not yours when it is on display and your gut and jungle logic tells you to possess it. This is what the sixty-year experiment in state handouts has achieved. The work is available if the indigenous black population seeks it. Indeed, Britain brings in tens of thousands of Gambians and Ghanaians and other migrants to staff hospitals and care homes and fill a “labor shortage” that does not exist. In accepting that Afro-Caribbeans have not needed to work, we have entrenched them in their postcode gangs and their ghetto. Softly, softly, the police and social services have gone. Regard the situation.

Education used to be the way up and the way out. No more. A generation of blacks feels no need, does not see the point, has no fathers or family to kick their backsides and tell them to strive. After all, it is so much easier to smoke ganja, to shoplift, to snatch a purse or bag, to hold a knife to a throat and rape a “bitch.” If all they are told is that they are the victims, the Earth’s rightful inheritors, and that cash can be generated without much effort, then they will follow their peers and the path of least resistance. The young offender institutions are full of them. Certainly there are doctors and lawyers and accountants in the black community, but they are few and scattered, and their middle class lacks depth and robustness. The knock-on is lack of aspiration.

What is left is a misplaced emphasis on street culture and the Afro-Caribbean way. Forgive me, but if what I had brought to British life was goat curry, carnival floats, crack cocaine, violence, and hip-hop, I would not be that proud. There are good people out there, people who strive and struggle and do their best. But they are undermined by both white and black apologists, by acceptance of indiscipline and of felony as occupational right, by a conspiracy of silence that prevents open debate. I have not heard a single BBC reporter say the word “black.” The situation would be absurd were it not so serious and the problems so deep.

The black American comedian Chris Rock once declared: “On one side, there’s black people. On the other, you’ve got niggers. The niggers have got to go. I love black people, but I hate niggers.” If the Afro-Caribbeans in London do not themselves confront and address the embedded flaws in their outlook and society, such things will be said with hatred and not laughter.

As for future riots—and they will come—the political class will continue to talk soothingly of “British” policing when all we really require is effective policing. Personally, I did not vote to allow London to become Jamaica’s brutal cockpit. I will thus be leaving my front door wide open and scattering a trail of glittering objects and designer wares to entice the raiders to my home. And I will be waiting for them. Then we can play.

Princess Diana

In a scene frighteningly reminiscent of the Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory, I recently found myself in a cab as its driver regaled me with a litany of his fears and theories regarding “the power behind the power,” i.e., the New World Order (NWO—so real, it even has an acronym). Each time I offered a counterargument, I aggravated his growing suspicion that I, too, was part of the sprawling plot and almost certainly in league with The Enemy. Perhaps I did not help matters by jamming a computer memory stick in my ear and pretending to speak into my wristwatch. The same week in a different cab, I suffered the ramblings of a Nigerian-born driver-cum-shaman who tried to argue that men could turn themselves into bats and fly because he said he had seen it with his very eyes. We never did reach our destination. Life is full of such riches.

So try this one. A film director immersed in the half-baked bullshit that is Kabbalah once attempted to convince me that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was preordained because the clue was there all along: Ash (for that is what millions were turned into), Kena (the Yiddish word, he claimed, for German), and Nazi (somewhat self-explanatory). Ashkenazi. Voilà, there you have it, the mystery is revealed. Silly me for missing the obvious. Odder and odder, as Alice might say. And that is before I have strayed into the crazy lands inhabited by L. Ron Hubbard’s thetans and swivel-eyed freaks. Maybe I should not be surprised at all the ambient lunacy. After all, for a teenage dare I once gate-crashed the Moonies’ NYC world headquarters. My sense of the absurd has been well-tuned ever since.

Conspiracy theories are everywhere, fueled by paranoia and fanned by the Web, preying on credulousness and stupidity and holding millions in thrall. As a creed and a comfort blanket it takes over where conventional or more staid religious practice leaves off, providing certainty and structure for fractured and chaotic lives. And it chimes well with prevailing victim culture: The small man and outsider can always blame his failure and disappointment on the system, on dark forces, on “The Man.” Logic is never enough, accidents never happen, and financiers are never fatheads who do not know what they are doing. No, it is always a seamless web of intrigue out to ensnare the unwary. The conspiracy fruit loops are on the case.

They have fertile ground to plough. In Nigeria, police arrested a goat on suspicion of being a bank robber who used magic power to transform himself and effect a getaway. In the Ivory Coast, numerous innocents were stoned to death for apparently being penis-snatching sorcerers. In the Congo, children have been castrated or harvested for organs destined to be used in black-magic rituals. Meanwhile, in the American Midwest, there are still those who believe they have been abducted, vivisected, inseminated, or anally probed by aliens. Those extraterrestrials sure lack taste.

As for the conspiracy theorists, any knowledge vacuum is there to be filled by fantasy. Any factual crumb exists to be mixed with others to create an overcooked plot. So Elvis lives and Mother Teresa was in fact a human fly; America did not land men on the moon (in spite of somehow having planted laser reflector mirrors there); its intelligence agencies demolished Building Seven during 9/11; Princess Diana was, of course, murdered by Prince Philip, consort to the Queen. But hell, even General Blucher—commander of the Prussians at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo—reportedly believed he had been made pregnant, first by a bull elephant and then by a French soldier. Insanity can be contagious.

It can also be deeply troubling when it gains traction. Look again at the defamatory allegations shameless Egyptian grocer Mohamed Al-Fayed peddled over Lady Diana’s death. His claims were tosh, but it took an expensive public inquiry and untold distress for the families involved simply to quash the lies and sate one wealthy foreign national’s vanity and conceit. Fayed should have known better. Indeed, he should have been aware that the optimum moment for assassination is as the target leaves home or arrives at the office or enters a bottleneck of slow-moving traffic. Diana was killed by circumstance and the antics of a depressed and drunk Paris Ritz-employed driver who should never have been at the wheel. Yet the conspiracy theorists will have none of it.

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For them—as with creationists and the thorny issue of fossil remains—contrary and weightier evidence is forever dismissed either as a strategic red herring or as part of the intricate plot against them. By their calculation, one plus one will always make five, six, or seven, when it should lead them to the square root of fuck all. That grassy knoll in Dallas has a great deal to answer for.

Much of modern conspiracy theory has its heritage in the Cold War, in the Three Days of the Condor angst and distrust of government engendered by both Vietnam and Watergate. Perceiving the enemy as an evil and omnipresent empire suited Senator McCarthy and the CIA as they jostled to over-egg the threat and justify their budgets. Technology has now made surveillance easier. It has correspondingly made the conspiracy freaks ever more fearful.

Evangelical religion has also played its part, for if belief involves a leap of faith there are always going to be those—unquestioning, flaky, small-brained, and easily led—who leap a little bit too far. There is pedigree here. Jonestown and Waco and Solar Temple suicides share a common denominator in their apocalyptic leanings and adherents who believe they are living in the End Times. Trace their lineage back through the Seventh Day Adventists and Pilgrim Fathers and you reach Europe’s 15th-century Taborites and 13th-century Albigensians. They, too, sat on mountains expecting final judgment and were mostly wiped out by government forces.

Outsiders and anyone with a grudge will ever ascribe greater omniscience and monolithic power to the ruling class than it actually deserves. Me, I’m a cock-up theorist. I am old enough to have seen many friends and contemporaries gain the levers of power, yet I’m experienced enough to have a healthy disrespect for their abilities and competence. The idea they are part of some secret and all-knowing cabal to which every event is connected is utterly ludicrous. These are people I saw in their younger days being covered in shaving foam and spanked by hookers at assorted bachelor parties and stag weekends, for God’s sake. Trust me, search elsewhere if you are following the conspiracy trail. But then, as a secret Templar knight and high priest of the ancient sun god Ra, I would say something like that.

Sure, you could not make out the tail-fin details on the United jets striking the Twin Towers. Spooky, maybe, that the first tower to fall was in fact the great keep of the Templars that collapsed in the final moments of the Siege of Acre in 1291 as the Crusaders were finally vanquished—and almost three thousand people were killed. You can join the dots on anything to produce a pentangle or a smiley face.

But for all the trillions of dollars America expended on its defense capabilities and strategic-communications networks, on the day of 9/11, George W. Bush was reduced to borrowing a cell phone in order to contact Washington, DC. God (or at least a gargantuan wicker owl) help us when things really turn bad.

Ego olere ergo sum. (I stink, therefore I am.)

Such could be the motto of the unpleasant and unwashed who these days routinely appear on a whim to riot in London’s streets. I suspect that this summer and autumn will see an upsurge in their antics. And all the while, supine and ineffectual, the police will be following from a safe distance as the rioters break glass, spray their paint, and terrify bemused and cowering onlookers.

They are all of a type. Like worms dropping from a dog scraping its rear on a carpet, violent thugs regularly break free from peaceful but left-wing-inspired demonstrations and embark on a frolic of their own. London has become a playground and free-fire zone for the freakish and the angry.

Now that the spoiled and subsidized public-sector workers are threatening strikes (thus sparing the nation several days of their slothful incompetence), the lunatic fringe will be gearing up. Locations will be chosen, banks and hotels and other evil centers of capitalism targeted, and the balaclavas donned. Here we go again. They bear a grudge and feel they must express it. Besides, rioting is fun. The greatest aspiration of misfits and inadequates is to spread fear and cause damage, to inflict grievous bodily harm on the society and system that feeds, houses, and indulges them. Give nonentities a cause or a boilersuit or a loose brick, and life becomes sweet for them and hell for the rest of us. National Socialism, anarchy, or holy war—recruits can always be found.

What so often marks out these protestors is their level of self-importance, their disregard for others, and their sheer aggression. They belong to a modern tribe that believes shouting the loudest makes them right. Even the peaceniks are insufferably belligerent. So it was with that odious and recently deceased “campaigner” Brian Haw, who took it upon himself to protest a variety of issues for a decade at Parliament Square. And, my, did the self-promotion go to his flannel-hat-covered head. The cause is largely irrelevant, as most of these professional megaphone-beatniks are actually working something out in their own wobbly psyches. Give them a platform and they’ll chain themselves to it. The rest of us have lives.

Regarding her old rival Joan Crawford, it was Bette Davis who allegedly pronounced:

You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good….Joan Crawford is dead. Good.

Now it is Brian Haw’s turn to pitch off this mortal coil. Good. Rest in peace, Brian. Some called him courageous, while I believed him to be deranged. I encountered him while being interviewed for radio on Parliament Square in a conversation he rudely and loudly gate-crashed as though he owned the site. He called me scum and claimed I had “the eyes of a murderer” (if only he knew), and I told him to fuck off. I felt a duty to maneuver this disturbed little Hitler in front of the microwave communications dish in order to sterilize him. Ah, happy memories and quite an insight into the fascistic and threatening mindset of the all-too-average protestor. Believe me, there is nothing warm and humane in those who espouse love and peace and the brotherhood of man.

Protestors rarely march for the common good. Observe those strident public-sector workers as they beat their drums and wave their placards and lay siege to London in the coming months. We are all supposed to be moved by their plight. Sod them, their generous pensions, their long holidays, their early retirements, their easy lives, and their constant whining. These are the favored and protected, the people who produce nothing, who add to the national debt, whose salaries and pensions and inflated bureaucracies have brought us near bankruptcy. Yet still they parade and complain that they might have to work to the same age as the rest of us. They blub that they will be forced to contribute to their own pensions. Never has there been a more vociferous special-interest group. And never in the field of human inertia has so little been done by so many for so few.

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Special interest, eh? Trouble is, they are not special. They are simply a byproduct of the spoiled, cosseted, unionized, and protected state sector. They know nothing of risk, of initiative, of individual effort, of enterprise—hell, even of working over weekends without complaint or massive overtime payments. Now the state—their patron and provider—is broke, and they must reap the consequence. There is no sweeter sound than their howls.

Like the rats running through folklore’s Hamelin town, they will come. I wonder if their strike action will actually affect the country’s running. I ponder whether the absence of lumpen teachers will have any impact on our children’s education. Maybe we will witness a vast improvement in standards and efficiency everywhere.

The liberal left is running somewhat scared. Its experiment in big government and bigger spending has abjectly failed and brought us to ruin. It knows there is little sympathy for its fellow travelers in the public sector at a time when everyone else bears the pain for its incompetence and mismanagement. Sure, those banking-sector oafs played their part in the disaster. Yet it was Europe’s socialist elites who came up with the ludicrous concepts of the Euro, of over-taxation, and of squandering financial resources.

Look again at those protestors. They actually believe they have a point and genuinely think they are entitled. Worse, they are consumed by the thought that everything should be free. After all, in their world, the state is their paymaster and is responsible for all: health, housing, education, pensions, and child welfare. From the cradle to the grave, Big Brother will remunerate and bless. It’s hardly surprising they find themselves confused and aghast at life’s real horrors.

As always the braying camp followers, the hooligans and window-smashers, the anarchists and professional demonstrators rush and attack what they perceive to be the bastions of wealth and privilege. Only the best department stores will do. I hope the Ritz and Fortnums are prepared, for there will doubtless be a lot of broken glass. Ironic, though, how it is these rioters who are privileged: They never have to work, think, gain an education, strive, or attain. It is we who must do that for them so they may chant and stink and throw their paving slabs and run away with their looted spoils of champagne and foie gras. Not for them the moral courage of genuine protest; not for them any kind of protest outside the London embassies of the world’s most truly malign and reprehensible regimes. No, it is the mother of parliaments and the richer shopping streets upon which they vent their rage. Because it is easy and because they can. The American liberal left had a nauseating habit of describing the LA riots as an “uprising.” It must have been the only political statement in history that involved blacks and Hispanics filling their shopping carts with looted television sets.

So let the protest and anarchy and rioting commence. It is a fun day out for the left’s sprawling and delusional family. Its members might believe they are making a stand, but they are only loudly reinforcing the message that they are worth ignoring.

Like a candle in the wind/
Never knowing where to run to/
When the raid came in….

Tra-la-la! So let us join together and sing out loud, for the somewhat perforated body of a sonofabitch has been eased into the deep. Personally, I would have preferred his burning corpse to be catapulted to the waves and his severed head placed on a spike atop the USS Carl Vinson’s bridge. But then, I have always been a little bit Old Testament. I see nothing wrong in punishment and retribution as part of justice. Some—such as our kindly, misguided, and druid-like Archbishop of Canterbury—are troubled and discomfited by recent events. I too am troubled; troubled that the White House balked at releasing a decent post-assault pic to serve as my computer screensaver; troubled that in being shot, bin Laden is automatically disqualified from my Top Ten list of favorite counter-terrorist Hellfire missile strikes. One cannot have everything.

The hand-wringers and bleeding hearts, the liberal left and the lawyers, are already bleating about an “unarmed man” being summarily executed and are demanding an inquiry. It was all to be expected, for these types—pontificating, sanctimonious, sweaty-palmed, and often garbed in the robes of the clergy or the law—rarely possess the spine or balls or common sense to do anything but talk. They have never held a weapon, hunted terrorists, stormed a compound, or been in a firefight. To them, morality is simply an intellectual exercise free of actual practical decisions. It allows them either to fence-sit or find moral equivalence in everything. They somehow fail to distinguish between hijackers flying four large passenger airliners at American population centers and an ineffably brave squad of US Special Forces employing a quartet of Black Hawk helicopters in a precision strike against a known terrorist figurehead in his command hideout. So they wail and protest and talk of due process. Spare me the cant.

Problem is, bin Laden was not just another unarmed man, in the same way that Hitler was not when Claus von Stauffenberg delivered a briefcase bomb to the Wolf’s Lair in July 1944. It did not make the attempted assassination any less legitimate. Bin Laden might have been far from the front and not wearing a sidearm—might not even have been in charge of day-to-day operations—but he was a live threat, active in the field, a present and future danger. So America killed the bastard. Good.

I do not care if he was fornicating or taking a shower, would not squeeze out a tear if he loved his mother or his wives, was kind to the elderly, was praying or begging for his life. It would make no difference if the bearded lunatic was having a shit and scrabbling for the last square of lavatory paper. Two rounds did the job. Team Six showed admirable restraint.

After Bill Clinton’s inert moral cowardice, finally something has been done. Read the Commission Report into 9/11. There were ample opportunities to deal with al-Qaeda and its malign leader. Clinton chose not to, preferring instead to launch cruise missiles at empty adobe huts somewhere in Afghanistan—a grand and futile gesture from a president known for misapplying tubular objects to missions for which they were not designed. It took Obama—through commitment and a fair degree of luck—to bring matters to an acceptable conclusion. Maybe it is not the beginning of the end, but let us hope—as Churchill neatly put it—it is the end of the beginning. I do not see the Arab world complaining.

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Others must be sweating. For all their protestations and excuses, their lies and counterclaims, the Pakistanis are bang to rights. Make no mistake, they are in it up to their necks. There can be little doubt that in the vast data seized during the compound raid, there will be evidence of high-level collusion between Pakistani intelligence and the terrorists. To us, the relationship might seem strange. Yet to the insatiably corrupt and duplicitous Pakistani hierarchs it makes perfect sense: Keep your enemies and clients close, your options open, and maintain a pressure point on the West. Oh, they will be worrying. More so when one considers the United States will have followed—and followed up—every vehicle coming and going over the past months from that compound. Pakistan knows that we know. It will reap the whirlwind.

I have never shied from supporting the occasional use of extrajudicial executions against operational terrorists. Due process is for those captured in Europe or America’s sanitized conditions. In tribal areas, mountainous regions, close-quarter battle, or locales ruled by pariah regimes and warlords, more robust measures are needed. There is little point in being squeamish or sensitive. It is a dirty game against a difficult enemy. As Special Forces ops in Afghanistan have demonstrated, targeted killings can have an effect. Drone attacks have winnowed numerous militants in Pakistan. A terrorist organization denuded of its leadership, relying on greener talent and forever looking over its shoulder, is in constant flux and therefore less effective. We should ever attempt to keep it that way.

There will be new bogeymen and future threats. The assassination of a single terrorist offers no panacea. View it instead as a holding operation, a containment exercise. Obama is right to claim that bin Laden’s death shows America does not forget and will eventually get its man. For all those believing the West was weak and lacking backbone, the dramatic raid was the riposte. Tackling bin Laden was the logical and obvious next step, the iced turban on the cake.

Terrorists make their choice and take their chance. It is they who don the suicide vests and deliberately target civilians and destroy rather than build; it is they whose raison d’être is to spread misery and fear. If their wish is to reach paradise through violence, we are honor-bound to facilitate their premature entry.

One illustrious former British politician drily observed that bin Laden was a fool. Had he sent his family ahead of him to Britain, he would have been able to claim residency and welfare here under the Human Rights Act. After all, there are many jihadist sympathizers and fellow travelers among Europe’s Asian Muslims. But those sympathizers should beware. The world does not want them, we do not need them, and the nascent Arab Spring is flowering without them. Bin Laden is gone and while in New York City next week, I will pay my respects to the thousands of innocents he killed. Let us spit on his hateful memory and move on.

All together now:

The brains blew out/
But the legend never did….

Queen Elizabeth II

You would have to possess a heart of granite not to have been moved or delighted by the royal nuptials in London. Great Britain may be an island now largely populated by the fat and the feckless, but we still manage to put on a pretty good show. And once again the skeptics and anti-monarchistes, the cramped and brittle souls of the left, stand confounded and outmaneuvered. They cannot quite believe that we like things as they are. They refuse to accept the public’s abiding affection for our system’s pomp, circumstance, and colorfully historical quirks. The world watches and wants more.

So the flags are stowed for another day, the horse dung removed, and the carriages sent back to their mews, and the country returns to politics and debt. But Wills and Kate’s wedding was a reminder. In a thousand-year-old abbey they created a space and a magic that every country needs and for which most nations would sell their gold reserves. Call it trickery or frippery or mirage, call it overblown or absurd—you cannot call it meaningless.

Constitutional monarchy works. The Queen has sat on the throne every day of my life. The left would deem this undemocratic. Far from it. She has underpinned our democracy, has remained a symbol of duty, continuity, stability, and history, a repository of collective memory and national consciousness, a totem of identity. After all, her image has appeared on over two hundred billion postage stamps. It gives Britain influence and reach. It provides its citizens with a reassuring safety net. When Spain sloughed off decades of Franco’s dictatorship, it purposely reinstated the monarchy. Give me Elizabeth II any day over the pasty-faced mediocrities who pass as our politicians. She might not be flash or fashionable, but she sure as hell is class. And she is ours.

Next year she will celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, marking 60 years in which Britain has retreated from empire, fought wars, suffered recessions, endured banking crises, joined the ridiculous European Union, seen the Soviet Union collapse, and witnessed a plethora of presidents and despots come and go throughout the world. Oh, and Osama bin Laden appeared and was only recently—and permanently—retired. Yet here, mercifully, a refined and thoroughly remarkable woman has ruled her island kingdom with dignity and grace. Quite some alternative to the Tony Blairs and Gordon Browns of this world.

Elizabethan, Regency, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian—we measure history and ourselves through the eras of our kings and queens. To view royalty simply as a fairytale is absurd. For sure there are castles and pageantry, heroes and villains, the odd appearance of tragedy and darkness. And yes, there are even the two ugly sisters—in the shape of Eugenie and Beatrice—who look as though their frocks have been fired at them from a cannon. But there is more to it than a mere panoply of figures to either to boo or cheer. We have our favorites—Will and Kate, Harry, the Queen, and Phil the Greek—and the narrative is shaped and our views sharpened by press reporting. So Andrew is dull and boorish, Edward pompous and marginal, Charles peevish and strangulated, Anne kin to a peppery fox terrier. Then there is the Duke of Edinburgh—astonishing for a man of ninety—who can still raise an eyebrow and a laugh. Only he could approach an African dignitary resplendent in beaded cap and white flowing robes with the words: “I see you’re already dressed for bed, then.” God bless him.

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Maybe we are too fixated on personality (or its modern equivalent, celebrity). Monarchy is actually at its best—and indeed survives—because it is dull and somewhat distant. It’s our mood music. Make it too familiar, loud, or close, and we will grow irritated or bored. It requires a safe pair of hands rather than flamboyance, the occasional carriage drive down the Mall rather than a monarch on a bicycle. Royalty is at its worst—and its lowest ebb—when it yearns to go street and “get down wid da people.” Perhaps you do not remember the ghastliness of The Grand Knockout Tournament—AKA It’s a Royal Knockout—the game show in which ill-advised young royals participated and almost wrecked the dignity of their office and position. There was Edward poncing about with a feather in his hat, Fergie behaving as a drunken barmaid, and Anne scowling as sour as a grapefruit. A low point. I swear I started losing my sight from that moment. (The nightmares have taken longer to expunge.) The Queen is admired precisely because she resolutely stays herself and is not a faddist. Some might call it unimaginative. But unimaginative is good…unimaginative is the opposite of risky and flaky…unimaginative is the secret to longevity and success. The institution is all that matters.

No system is perfect. Surrounded by the yes-men, lickspittle grotesques, and third-rate homosexual cabin-crew types elevated to Buckingham Palace’s liveried realm, it is unsurprising many royals grow up without proper judgment or advice. Yet fawning and toadying spring up wherever there is power or privilege, and the royal court is no exception. And because real executive power lies elsewhere, the damage tends to be superficial. At least William has a circle of trusted friends. The auguries are good.

Our monarchy costs every British citizen per year the equivalent price of a loaf of bread. Factor in the tax it now pays, the tourism it brings, the charities it supports, the broadcast fees and media print runs it generates—and the Exchequer is talking a handsome profit. Not a bad return. And not a poor performance for an octogenarian female who is working well past the standard retirement age.

The spiteful anti-monarchists are in a dispirited state, for their support base is moribund and no one can hear them above the crowd’s patriotic roar. We have a monarchy, so let us celebrate and be grateful and proud.

People in Scotland were lukewarm toward the royal wedding and will doubtless prove equally unenthusiastic for the sovereign’s Diamond Jubilee next year. I would expect nothing less of these ugly, chippy, wife-beating alcoholics north of the border. Ironically, they cost England far more to subsidize than the monarchy ever has.

If one were to—hypothetically—shoot every other public-sector worker in the back of the head, I believe you would not notice a single blip, hiccup, or ripple in the country’s operation. Things might very well improve, including our national finances.

The state sector is the chief vehicle by which the witless, the retarded, and the pathologically lazy can find employment. They produce nothing, they do nothing, they mean nothing. It is why the political left embraces them and why they in turn cling to the political left—all at the poor bloody taxpayer’s expense.

Inside the state machine, ability does not count: People are automatically elevated and rewarded with myriad and meaningless posts in diversity directorates, health and safety departments, and every other bureaucratic embolism clogging the country’s lifeblood. But the masses of time-wasting and self-serving state-sector lard-arses would have you believe their six-hour-a-day non-jobs are critical to our national prosperity and well-being. Funny how we survived long before the spendthrift lunacy of the Blair-Brown years added nearly a million of these idle inadequates to the state payroll.

These are the types who are marching now, who howl resentment at the nominal budget cuts, who cannot believe that real life has so rudely intruded. How they wail and screech that they were drawn to public-sector work through a selfless love of humanity and an overweening desire to serve. I am unsure whether to retch or laugh. Few of them would survive in the environment outside—the one in which initiative and responsibility are required.

A teaching assistant recently complained on national radio that she had selflessly sacrificed a glittering private-sector career to do her classroom bit for the nation. Heart-rending stuff. I would put money on her being scarcely able to pick up dog shit from a sidewalk or to roll broiler chickens in a secret bread-crumb recipe.

These idiots assail us everywhere. Spot the adenoidal Martian who leads the Labour opposition addressing his party faithful and the angry public-sector workers. He tells them they are loved and represent the majority. And he is utterly wrong. Such delusions are commonplace among the left. After all, various Labour placard-wavers claimed affinity with the Egyptian demonstrators of Tahrir Square. Yeah, right.

Labour and their union backers are telling us that cutting the deficit is an immoral Tory conspiracy. They would say that. But stare into the abyss and consider the figures. In Britain we are heading for a trillion pounds and beyond in our national debt. We are paying well over forty billion a year in interest payments alone—as much as the entire defense budget. Those annual interest payments are anticipated to rise to eighty billion pounds within the next few years.

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A recent report into British policing revealed the “subsidized indolence” built into the system. The problem is endemic to the entire public sector. They know their rights and their perks and their impregnable position, and because they are not paid according to results, there is no incentive to perform.

As the saying goes: If you cannot do, you teach. In fact, if you cannot teach, you teach. The records show that over the past decades only a handful of state-sector teachers have ever been sacked for incompetence. Most have to get a schoolgirl pregnant before even an eyebrow is raised. It is symptomatic of a general malaise and indifference and is a direct consequence of unionization.

Wherever there is inertia and apathy and appalling waste, you will find the trade unions. Observe the private-sector companies hived off from the state—British Airways and the railways included—and they are the ones held hostage by their militant labor force, whose service and fortune and future are compromised. A week before the London Olympics, you can bet the Tube drivers will stage a walkout, even though their subway trains stop and start automatically. Every decade produces its fresh spawning of Marxist shop stewards and trade-union bosses, men who think nothing of bludgeoning the rest of us with their atavistic demands and senseless strikes. What they proclaim is democracy and workers’ rights; what they serve is their own ego and narrow self-interest.

Were I to go on strike, to mount a sit-in, or to whine about what society owes me, I would starve. That is our lot in the private sector. Yet we accept this and are the ones who take the risk and create the wealth, who use our initiative and our brains to succeed in the jungle. Those sitting cushy in their state-sponsored sinecures have no excuse. They were not forced to become care workers, were not frog-marched into council-office backrooms. In the same way I decided to become a writer, they chose their particular course. So do not march or complain or voice astonishment at no longer being able to enjoy early retirement and to take us for fools. What an impertinence that the public sector might actually have to work as hard as the rest of us; what a liberty we should demand they forfeit their final salary pension schemes as we have long since done.

Maybe the days of big government, Big Brother, and big spending are over. The postwar socialist experiment has failed. We wanted to create equality and instead produced dependency. We intended for a fairer system and instead fostered a lumbering, bloated bureaucracy that helped itself and no one else.

From the BBC to the NHS and from Education to Welfare—empires dominated by the left—the employees are paid for by an overstretched and overtaxed public. It is time to demolish the complacency and ineptitude. State-based employment is surely the enemy of enterprise. Yet I fear the cuts will be too little and far too late and we will continue our debt-laden slide. The unions and the labor movements would love that. We must deprive them of that pleasure.

“I’m ninety-one years old, you know?”

Bravo. Now have your diuretics and your hot milk drink, take your heart pills and blood-pressure tablets and your fistful of other prescription drugs, then we’ll provide an enema and influenza jab, change your dressings and diaper, bind your leg ulcer, and do fuzzy-felt shapes to counteract the Alzheimer’s. One thing we will not do is let you die.

God, it is so undignified. Visit a respite home or a modern cattle-pen for the aged, and you will be struck first by the rolling banks of urine fumes and then by the absurd pathos of it all. Here, an old man exposing himself; there, an ancient woman flashing her knickers at anyone who notices. I know people who, having placed their mother in a home, returned from doing the paperwork to find her being dry-humped by some old pervert (talk about settling in); I know another whose grandfather—a distinguished former general—was spotted running crazed and naked down a provincial town’s High Street.

And someone is making money, turning the elderly into bewildered cash cows, milking them of every dime, dollar, and ounce of dignity. The beneficiaries are the caregivers, the medical profession, and the pharmaceutical giants, those who have a vested interested in putting in the cannula and the drips and keeping their medicated and vegetative charges clutching to this mortal coil.

We should be ashamed, but our fear of death and obsession with longevity make it otherwise. An American comedian once suggested that his elderly grandparents become stuntmen in a martial-arts movie, arguing it was nobler for them to get their heads removed by a well-aimed roundhouse kick than to fade to grey nothingness in a care home.

Of course, luck and genetics play their part. Some elderly people do fine: Three of my great aunts were completing The Times’ daily cryptic crossword until their deaths in their nineties, while a friend’s eighty-something father continues single-handedly tending his cattle and flock of six hundred sheep right through winter’s depths. They are an inspiration, but they are rare.

Sure, not every octogenarian wants to drag straw bales and sacks of animal feed through a snowdrift. But what society has opted for is the other extreme, where the sick and demented and doubly incontinent are maintained, patched up, and placed on life support as if a heartbeat at any cost is all that matters. The Who once sang of hoping to die before they got old. That same generation now expects to live way beyond old age, to defy death even if control and faculties are gone. Life—rather than quality of life—is the new tyranny.

It is why people have begun to take matters into their own hands, traveling to Switzerland’s Dignitas clinic to bring forward their passing. Many observers feel uneasy and squeamish at the concept of accelerating one’s departure via assisted suicide. Yet they remain strangely silent on the current practice of artificially sustaining existence beyond a reasonable term.

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We all have a shelf life and a sell-by date. Modern medicine and mores keep us around far too long. A friend of mine’s grandfather recently took his own life. A widower and WWII veteran, he simply decided a prolonged decline was not quite his thing. He cleaned his home, set his calendar, put a plastic bag over his head, and secured it with a scarf. It was his decision and moment, the act of a profoundly brave man.

Scratch the surface of most men and you will find a Beau Geste element that wishes to die whilst charging an enemy with a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other. This is precisely how one relation died in the Great War; sadly, he was only 21. In previous eras, death’s closer presence gave life its definition. Today we feel aggrieved and cheated if death should even intrude. In the same way that nips, tucks, and facelifts have transformed celebrities into grotesque and plasticized shadows of their former selves, so medicine has postponed death and dehumanized existence. We claim that life is sacred and then go about devaluing it. Nature is kept at bay and the Grim Reaper sits in reception at every care home growing bored, flicking through the magazines, and gagging on the smell as we insist on clinging on to complete another jigsaw.

How totally bloody depressing. There must be a way to swallow-dive gracefully to eternity rather than be carried there on a litter with dementia and soiled underwear. An old friend of mine once suffered a heart attack in her garden. As her daughter rose to call for an ambulance, the old lady ordered her to do nothing. She fully understood her time was up and had no desire to be revived, to be probed and prodded, to join the endless queue of geriatrics constantly shuttled between home and hospital. She passed away in the garden she loved with her family and dogs at her side.

This is our life and it should be our death. Both have been hijacked. The Anglo-Saxons believed that human existence was akin to a bird flying through a great hall’s open window and spending a short while in the warmth and light before heading out once more to the darkness. They would be perplexed at how their descendants have allowed that bird to flutter aimlessly and crawl toward the end.

When her elderly mother is being particularly obnoxious, a friend of mine takes Mum in the car and slowly circles a roundabout in front of a local nursing home until the warning is understood and the old lady says tersely through gritted teeth: “Get me out of here.…”

Infirmity and old age should never become a reason to be forced off the planet. But we would never unleash on our beloved house pets the indignities we foist upon our elderly. In extending life for the sake of it, we conspire to cheapen it and remove all meaning. DO NOT RESUSCITATE should be our creed.

Count me out of this bullshit. When my mental faculties and bodily functions go, I wish to be chloroformed.

“What do we want?” Um…. “When do we want it?” Er….

Well, knock me down with a fire extinguisher (preferably dropped from a serious height). British students are out on the streets protesting loudly against a tuition-fee hike. As one cynic observed, television scheduling must have been lousy that day. For here we see members of a privileged breed—Idlelayabout Bastardus—crawling from their bedsits and residence halls, gathering to march, shout, and stamp their tiny feet. Good on them, even though nobody else gives a damn.

For all the froth, fury, throwing of fireworks, and assaults upon Prince Charles’s limo, the students will not garner popular support. They will mount sit-ins, daub graffiti, and parade their placards and phonetically spelled slogans. But nothing will disguise the faint whiff of self-indulgence. Gone are the big issues of Vietnam, nuclear disarmament, love, and peace. In their place are youths in grimy underwear and unwashed clothes shouting, “Me! Me! ME!!!”

They are victims not of Tory policy, but of their own egos and overweening expectations. This is the freeload and free-download generation, a group weaned on entitlement and bred to believe in what P. J. O’Rourke dubbed “gimme” rights. The poor, misguided fools. They have come of age just as the perfect storm arrives, a tempest created by the previous Labour government both espousing a “crap in/crap out” approach to university admissions and bringing the country to the verge of bankruptcy. There simply is no money.

Naturally, this truth does little to pacify the indignant shrieks from the enraged and entitled student fraternity. They do not wish to pay for their further education. They believe we owe it to them and ourselves to subsidize their personal self-improvement journeys. In providing them finance we are, they insist, investing in Great Britain’s future prosperity.

Forgive my skepticism, but my house requires the attention of a reliable electrician and plumber, not a half-baked and poorly written essay on media studies or art history. Tens of thousands of university students—most of whom seem unable to spell or form a working sentence—graduate each year with their embossed certificates and vastly inflated views of their prospects and abilities. They graduate knowing how to sink a pint, smoke a spliff, sleep through tutorials, and even walk on water. Watch out world, here they come. Sadly, the currency is utterly debased and the unfortunates discover plenty of their own kind in the open market, all waving the same meaningless scrap of paper.

We do not need these graduates, or at least the kind who are spoon-fed and module-based and who acquire intellectual and academic pretensions without ever being intellectual or academic. The system is incontinent, processing the same shit year after year, and we are the ones charged for the cleanup. And still the students insist: “We are worth it. We matter. We are a glorious asset to the nation.” I beg to differ. The majority of top-flight universities are American and are therefore privately endowed and not state-funded. They thrive and the country reaps the benefit. Britain needs a similar level of excellence without the taxpayers being hobbled.

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Call me a gold-plated hypocrite, for that is what I am. It is one of the pleasures of getting older. Back in the days when only some ten percent of the young went on to university, the government paid and the institutions could impose quality control. Yup, I got to play with the casino money. I did precious little work. We were spoiled. We had tuition fees covered and maintenance grants provided. We could fart about, fornicate, and wile away three years. It was only later—first as a postgraduate and then at Bar School—that I actually bothered to study. By then, I was paying my own way and had been forced to take out a student loan. It made me focus and encouraged me to take responsibility. The moral: If you are the one paying, you seriously commit.

We had it easy and tomorrow’s debt-laden graduates will have it tough. Life can be like that. But the world and its universities are altered, and the students—given the absurd expansion in ludicrous courses—will for once be obliged to contribute. Few are more selfish and self-regarding than they are, thinking that the nation-state depends on them and should provide a feather-bedded living. Reality can be cruel. So I’ll put it in digestible textspeak for them: IT’S OVER (downturned smiley face).

Police and the public have so far been patient with them as they conduct their gesture politics. Perhaps they should be allowed to vent their energy and burn off their junk-food diets. Yet as time passes and the hysteria grows, as their publicity stunts morph to resemble RAG Week on steroids, society may tire of their antics. In order to engage in special pleading, you really need to be special. Today’s students are not.

Maybe if they performed like dancing bears, the rest of us might warm to them. Maybe it’d help if the police turned water cannons on them to create novelty ice-sculpture parks for our amusement. Maybe they could fight the Taliban, pick up litter, or sell their kidneys. Students could prove their intrinsic worth via any of these methods.

When it comes to employment matters, it’s strange how sectors such as British banking so often turn to motivated and trained applicants from overseas. Yet I am expected to continue doling out my hard-earned cash on behalf of our “skilled and flexible” students. Please, just go away.

Be charitable during Yuletide. Spare a thought for those student protesters and high-school politicos shivering on our streets. I want to give them food and drink and bring them to the warmth. Then I remember, as should they—there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Divorced, decapitated, dead—King Henry VIII’s wives had it simple. For 21st-century fortysomethings—my contemporaries—the litany of woe is somewhat more extensive: dull, dumped, dejected, disillusioned, deranged, drunk, druggy, dried-out, dried-up, and often dangerously desperate. Only on occasion are they ever beheaded. Forget the terrible twos; the failed forties are the real shocker. It is a noxious age.

There is something rotten in the soul of modern fortysomethings. Every survey suggests they are the most miserable pick of the crop. Their malaise runs deeper than the average midlife crisis, with its desire to paraglide, own a motorbike, date the young, and inject the Botox. No, it is much bleaker. Mortality looms, life’s end can be glimpsed ahead, and the fortysomethings cannot handle it. Above everything sits the blackest cloud of all—a heavy sense of disappointment.

Look around and ask yourself if you are edified by what you see, uplifted and delighted by the fortysomething company you keep. I doubt it. The men are invariably jaded, careworn, humorless, overworked, and dull; the women are wide-hipped, flat-shoed, pre-menopausal, neurotic, self-absorbed, and mad. Oh, and the visits to the therapist exacerbate the drivel and tedious introspection. God, where has a lightness of touch and all the laughter gone? Gone to graveyards, every one.

Contentment is a distant dream for the fortysomething. There’s a dawning realization that surprises are few and surprising people are fewer, that life is what it is and this is truly it. Oh, shit. The parents are dying off and the children growing up. Time accelerates and age creeps on. The push of youthfulness recedes and the pull of fiftydom beckons. And the buck stops here. Small wonder about the despondency and dismay. Singles want to be married and the married wish to be single. Relationships buckle to the pressures of boredom and indifference and the graying of the spirit.

Read the subtext to those Christmas round robins. Decipher the faux, Prozac-and-booze-fueled cheeriness and smug certitude. “We have had a blissful and successful year, entertaining and traveling and having so much fun! Although David lost his leg in a gardening accident and gave me chlamydia from a now-ended affair, everyone is thriving. Freddy did wonderfully in his exams but was sadly eaten by a Nile crocodile during his gap year. Sebastian discovered skunk and developed schizophrenia in his first term up at Oxford. Sophie, bless her, is loving boarding school, is Grade 5 clarinet, and has become a mother at thirteen! How lucky we all are….” The families are dysfunctional and disintegrating, and you would never know.

The fortysomethings are the unhappiest of has-beens. Some make it and others do not; some simply lack the balls and spine to fight their way to the other side. Face it: The kids have the energy, optimism, and potential. That is before they grow up to be smackheads, serial murderers, or estate agents and generally to disappoint. But their disasters are for later. Meantime, their fortysomething parents trudge onward, resenting and envying them in equal measure, wanting to ape and live through them, to be their friends and seduce their teen acquaintances, to rediscover their golden age. The offspring inhabit a space close enough to remember yet too distant to wholly comprehend. It rankles. It hurts. It leaves another nail beside the open coffin.

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Myth and bitterness and regret haunt the modern fortysomethings. They are too old to dance well and too young to have gravitas. They want to run in the sun, only to find their knees give and their backs ache. They lack their wartime grandparents’ moral certainty and courage, inheriting instead the baby boomers’ spoiled indolence. They are bored with their circumstances, jobs, spouses, and friends. They are trapped without an alternative. This generation expected much and desired everything, yet it seems confused to find that at the end of every rainbow is a crock of shit. They are a sorry and feckless lot. Sans faith, sans grit, sans understanding, sans ability to cope. Sans everything. Scarcely surprising I was forced to rebuke a bleating fellow fortysomething with the words, “I’m acquiring a nut allergy—guess who’s the nut?”

Put it down to a passing phase, the listless mania of an in-between stage that will one day evaporate into pleasure and acceptance. Life is imperfect, and the fortysomethings have yet to stumble on this truth. They want it easy and do not find it so. Forty to fifty is the great divide, the chasm—as gaping as any male pattern baldness—between the successful and the also-rans, the fit and the gone-to-seed, the rabbit-rearers and the bunny-boilers, the bearing-up and the trodden-down. There are some real crashes out there. Middle age can be more beleaguered and beset with dark forces than Middle-earth itself.

One answer is to grit the teeth, smile, and plow on. The trick is to find happiness where one may—honestly, even a blueberry muffin delights me—but fortysomethings make a habit of inventing and embellishing problems they have plucked from thin air (or that have been suggested by their hairdressers, counselors, fitness gurus, life coaches, or embittered alcoholic friends). When these are exhausted, they move on to embrace their children’s playground troubles. I would love to call it a syndrome, but it is merely a pain in the butt.

So as I steel myself to attend another drab and dreary drinks party populated by drab and dreary individuals with their drab and dreary conversation, I cheer myself with the thought that we fortysomethings are simply in chrysalis-transition and will pupate on the other side of fifty into brighter and more fascinating creatures. Should I be wrong, stamp on me now.

A more useless and unnecessary thing than an expedition into this country could not be imagined…

These are words lifted from the diary of Brigadier-General Henry Brooke who, in April 1880, took command of the British garrison in Kandahar just as the Second Afghan Revolt ignited. He was to have a torrid time of it, and his diary contains many a salutary and revealing truth. Wind on to the present and another bloody mess: the US and Britain meddling in Afghanistan. Conference after conference, year after year, and nothing is resolved. There are numerous arguments surrounding our Afghan involvement; there can be none as to the muddle and mistake, the wasted chances, the courage of our armed forces, the dreadful loss in life and limb. Lessons have been learnt, we are told. Sure.

So General Dave has replaced General Stan, the surge is at its peak, the Brits are redeploying, and western political leaders scrabble to construct an exit strategy with as much dignity and little panic as their faltering nerves allow. Meantime, on an almost daily basis, the IEDs continue to winnow our men. Gone is the messianic and democratizing zeal of Bush and Blair. In its place is the weary recognition that the Taliban has the time, the will, the manpower and the advantage. The enemy have got it right and we consistently have got it badly wrong. There are few opportunities left in that benighted land. Our problem. Our fault. Our failure.

Our strategy now—and it is manifestly flawed—is threefold. Firstly, to sustain and strengthen a central government in Kabul whose writ will run throughout Afghanistan. Secondly, to expand and mentor the Afghan National Army (ANA) to enforce centralized authority and replace US and NATO forces as they withdraw from the battle space. Thirdly, to employ that Kabul government and its enlarged military in building the nation and keeping at bay the Taliban. The approach is doomed. Yet even as it morphs into fiasco we will call it by another name, will wash our hands and blame it on the Afghan. Trust me on this—one day, appearing on a flatscreen television near you, will be President Karzai either waving from happy tax exile or hanging from a Kabul lamppost with his genitals mutilated and greenbacks stuffed in his open mouth.

Afghans—especially Pashtuns—will always fight, in particular against invading or occupying foreigners and their corrupt government stooges in Kabul. That is their way and we have provided the excuse. Kinship, blood-feud and skirmish are as much part of their being as is drinking lousy, frothy ersatz coffee for the average Londoner. Add to this the destabilizing great game of India vs. Pakistan, Iran vs. the west, and Islamic extremism vs. all Unbelievers, and the stage is set for meltdown. Do not be misled by the sight of ballot-boxes and national elections. They are a mirage and distraction. Of the thirteen predecessors to President Karzai, twelve were killed, deposed or forced to flee. The auguries are not positive. As Brigaadier-General Brooke observed 130 years ago: “I fear we could not hope to change the nature of the Afghan, who is born a treacherous, lying, murdering scoundrel.”

Well, it’s a point of view and one that might resonate today. But the real issue is that we have not delivered on security, development and governance and thus support for us has waned. All our hopes and misdirected energies are invested in creating an Afghan army that—by the nature of its rapid expansion—will be undertrained, ill-disciplined, poorly led and liable to melt away in the face of armed and determined opposition. One young British officer recounted to me how he had warned three Afghan soldiers of an IED-threat up ahead and instructed them to wait for an ordnance-disposal team. They ignored him and accelerated their vehicle through the kill-zone in order to ‘outrun’ the device: they were vapourized in the ensuing blast. It does not bode well. Already, desertion rates are running at 25% (and these are men who will take their weapons with them); already, the Tajik domination of the military has fuelled resentment among the Pashtuns and created yet greater perception of foreign occupation. The seeds are being sown for a new north-south, Tajik-Pashtun, Taliban-Northern Alliance civil war. Hostilities resumed. It is how the Talib originally gained momentum and how it does so again.

The Pashtun Belt is the key and we are—whatever the brave or upbeat talk—currently losing the battle. Boots on the ground simply aggravates the problem and creates more targets; aerial bombardment multiplies the grievances; foreign or ANA troops are seen as little more than anti-Pashtun mercenaries of a corrupt and unpopular Kabul regime. A vicious and calamitous circle. There are 9 million Pashtuns (42% of the population) comprising of some 350 patchwork tribes and inhabiting the main crime and conflict areas. It is because the Taliban has worked so tenaciously at the tribal and grassroots level in cultivating, supporting and exploiting local leaders and village groupings, that its grip has tightened. In effect, the Taliban has ridden in on the back of Pashtun exasperation and resentment.

We could learn much and choose not to, remaining wedded to the heavy-handed and top-down approach that daily stokes the conflict.

Hence—after nine years of blood, treasure, sweat and mourning—rockets fall on Kabul and the country slowly withers. Collapse will occur. What we should truly be doing is working to the grain of Afghan society, localising instead of centralising, building the nation from the ground up. This is not to argue for a return to the failed days of warlordism and local militias. Rather it is to promote the formation of local defence based on tribal loyalties, controlled by the jirgas and responsive to the needs of the people. It was once employed to great effect in southeast Afghanistan, where tribal security was traditionally placed in the hands of three organisations: the Kishakee (scouts who gathered intelligence), the Lashkar (a larger defence force called together to confront a common foe), and the Arbakai (respected tribal police answerable to the jirga and local community and tasked with implementing laws and guarding the tribal borders). Defence was seen to be for the people and arranged by the people, with back-up provided by the national army. Common sense and a light touch. We seem to adopt neither.

Maybe it is too late; maybe we have travelled so far down a particular (IED-littered) road—with attendant pride and vested interests at stake—that change is impossible. A real pity. For with a feel for what is happening on the ground, we could create peace and a structure that might hold. Instead we will become passing interlopers in another failed state.

Our Vietnam? Only in so far as our technology and military superiority are not enough and matters will doubtless conclude in butchery and with Westerners escaping by helicopter from the roof of the American embassy as enemy forces trundle into town.

In one of his last diary entries, Henry Brooke wrote: “Still so many foolish things have been and are continually done in connection with our campaigns in Afghanistan, the present moves after all may achieve nothing.”

The Brigadier-General was shot and killed on August 16 1880 as he led an attempt to clear insurgents from the village of Deh Khoja not five thousand yards from the walls of Kandahar. His body was carried home to Co. Fermanagh for burial with full military honours. Placed on his coffin were sprigs of maidenhair fern grown by his widow from a cutting he had taken while travelling through the Bolan Pass en route for Kandahar. One hundred and thirty years later, the coffins still arrive and we continue to mourn the fallen.

I was as polite to him as his breath would allow…

Thus wrote Jane Austen in a letter to her sister, displaying some of the withering insight and laughing bitchiness for which the British upper echelons are deservedly celebrated. Class is back on the agenda. It baffles our foreign friends and infuriates the liberal-left, but love them or loathe them—the toffs are once again in charge. Hell, it is their turn. David Cameron has variously been described by detractors as looking akin to a penis with a face drawn on it, buttocks with a pair of eyes, a well-oiled saveloy, and even Pillsbury Dough Boy. Cheap shots and a tad harsh and all because he went to Eton. Cameron might just prove to be one of the greats. 

There is nothing wrong in class. Every society arranges itself, divides into tribes, measures its own by region, trade, education, wealth or accent. If it is done with humor and a light touch and does not stifle personal fulfillment, class can add color and richness to the national texture. From Monty Python onward, poking fun at ourselves through the prism of the British class system has become fair game. So it is a comedian can shudder at living in a middle-class enclave only a single post code away from where they sell white bread; so it is another comic can mock the middle-class shoplifters who only steal organic humus and fair-trade products. Everyone gets the joke.

With the use of a single word, a Brit will betray his class; how a girl wears her hair or holds a wine glass will in an instant reveal her social roots. Outdated snobbery, some might argue. Not a bit of it. In Britain, we measure or prejudge people on so much more than money alone. There is nuance and subtlety and that is refreshing.

As a self-confessed toff—condemned to my class by dint of circumstance, private education and a family tree littered with various aristos, country squire, and homes mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086—I have never felt compelled to apologize for my outlook, voice or background. My friends range from those worth several hundred million pounds to those with absolutely nothing. Yet they all know the code and speak in the shorthand and received-pronunciation of the upper class. I doubt such variety would exist anywhere else. It is the middle-classes that are far more guilt-laden for having escaped the class below. This is why they and not the workers provide the patronizing backbone of the liberal left.

My how the class thing rankles with the political left. It really matters to them. To the rest of us it is background noise, an amusing diversion. Without the toffs, the world would be more drab and monochrome and would never have read Nancy Mitford’s observation: “I like children, especially when they cry—for then someone comes to take them away.” Without toffs, I would not have heard of my mother’s crushing riposte to a large black African male who accosted her and rudely enquired “Hey granny, you want sex?” She answered: “And who pays whom?” The man bolted. So live and let live, embrace the differences, and allow the classes to breathe.  

Naturally, those outside the toff strata tend to invest it with greater importance and impact than it strictly deserves. To the Left, the upper-classes represent a giant
and self-perpetuating cabal of influence and control. They conveniently forget the ghastliness of thirteen years of Labour and the toxicity of its own pervasive and chianti-swilling establishment. Misconception abounds. The non-toffs still suspect the progeny of the upper classes are sent away to boarding school in tea chests to endure a brutal regime of buggery, cold showers, and being toasted with muffins over an open hearth. Rites of passage have changed somewhat since the nineteenth-century, yet still the myths prevail.

A week ago, I attended the absurd theatre production (and pastiche of David Cameron’s undergraduate days) Posh at The Royal Court in London. Again, its basic premise–—of arrogant toffs seamlessly evolving from being drunken undergraduates into holding the levers of power—was utterly fatuous and flawed. The approach is no more convincing than the theory that America is run by a narrow handful of men armed with flaming torches and gathered round a giant wicker owl.

Outsiders will always get it wrong, for they are not part of the clan and approach it with their preconceptions, their clumsiness, and their large collective axe to grind. So it was the play Posh had its supposed toffs speaking in ways they in reality would eschew (no toff would say “toilet” or “thanks ever so much”). An absolute giveaway, along with those other Verboten words: “pardon,” “patio,” “lounge,” “settee,” “dessert,” “serviette,” and “condiments.” I told you it was nuanced. Yes, it’s a minefield out there for the nouveau riche.

Having enjoyed many of the parties thrown by the very dining clubs parodied in Posh, I can vouch they amounted to little more than the footling and alcohol-fueled antics of the young and relatively wealthy. True, some of their number have since done well and ended with moats, landscaped grounds, and the odd bank; others have crashed and burnt. Most are leading average and pretty unremarkable lives. Yet I will forever remember them vomiting, streaking, raising hell and even dressed as mediaeval executioners and remonstrating with a bemused police officer in the center of Oxford. It was the era of the Brideshead Revisited television series, after all.

Class has long ceased to be a reliable pointer to future success and personal achievement. Privilege is no guarantee of inheriting the earth. And rightly so. When the mockney diction of the younger royals wallows in slack vowels and glottal stops and the wife of the Prime Minister speaks more like a pearly queen than the toff she truly is, class distinction is obviously blurring. It would be a pity to lose it entirely, for something uglier and cheaper will surely take its place. The toffs should be celebrated, not as part of a rigid hierarchy but as one element in a sliding-scale of diversity. Somewhere, the old values—courage, understatement, humor, and a sense of duty and fair play—still exist. That is no small contribution. So forgive the toffs the mindless and bread-roll throwing antics of their misspent youth. They might come good.

A rather grand and ancient friend of my family once received an obscene phone-call. She listened unfazed for several minutes before finally giving reply. “Young man,” she told the pervert. “If you knew how old and fat I was—you wouldn’t want to fuck me at all…”

Now that’s class.